Fall to Pieces (14 page)

I knew it was only a matter of time before Brittany’s shit got back to him.

“Do you?” I ask, flopping onto a bale of hay. I reach into my pocket and pull out my phone and fumble with the buttons. Finally, I manage to send a single-word message to Mark.

Barn
.

He’ll be here in less than ten minutes. He always is. And Pet will be with him.

“Do I what?” Tristan asks.

I shrug, pick up a bit of hay, and twirl it in my fingers, examining it to make sure there’s no pigeon poo on it. I slide the hay into my mouth and chew, chew, chew. As if I’m chewing the misery out of the world. I don’t know if I’m ready to ask him this question yet.

He whacks the hay out of my hand. “That’s cow food,” he says. “You’re a human. You don’t have six stomachs.”

I roll my eyes. “Thanks for that little piece of information. Really illuminating.”

“You know what else would be illuminating? If you told me what
the hell you’re asking me
.”

There’s no way to phrase my question delicately. So I choose to avoid asking it at all. “Do you...want to go home?” I say instead. “It’s pretty obvious you don’t like Pick Me Ups.”

I mean, there’s no reason for him to be here. He freaked out so badly after the bridge and when I jumped from the third floor and when I almost fell from the tree. I’m giving him an out. If he wants it. Because I’m sick of being a bitch.

“No.”

“But—why?”

He sweeps some hay aside, absentmindedly traces the letter
E
in the dirt beneath it. Runs his fingers through those lines over and over again. “You saved my life,” he says eventually. “We’re not really even. I want us to be even.”

He’s such a bad liar. “You’re lying,” I say. “You’re fucking lying. Don’t stay because you feel sorry for me. I don’t need your pity.”

I don’t need anyone’s pity.

“Well, you don’t fucking have it, okay? God.” He stands up, puts some distance between us. “You’re insane; did you know that? Are you always like this?”

“Like what?” I don’t bother answering the question about my sanity.

“Hypocritical.”

“What do you mean?”

“You weren’t going to ask me about going home. What did you really want to say,
you
fucking liar?”

I glower at him. Fine, if he wants to hear it, I’ll say it.

“Do you like burning things?” Deadpan voice. Deadpan eyes.

He shakes his head. “Are you being serious?”

Suddenly, all I want to do is take the question back, pull my words back inside me and keep them locked away forever. I hear Heather on repeat in my head:
You’re a horrible person, you’re a horrible person, you’re a horrible person
.

And shit, she’s right. Even when I’m trying to be nice, I’m an asshole.

Tristan runs a hand through his hair. “Look,” he says. “Just because it’s red. Does. Not. Make. Me. An. Arsonist.”

“But you are an arse,” says another voice.

Mark knows how to make an entrance. Most beautiful girl in a five-mile radius on his arm, witty comeback line on his lips.

And Petal, shit. I’m still amazed that this goddess of a girl ever chose to hang out with me. She belongs with the perfect girls. The ones who drive expensive cars and don’t jump off buildings, or break into supermarkets, or hang out with boys who smell like gunpowder. Thank god for her extreme misanthropy, her hatred of all social bullshit and the mind games those perfect girls seem to play with each other in Sherwood.

“What’s up?” Petal asks.

What’s up is that their timing is perfect. What’s up is
that if I had to stand here for even another minute with Explosive Boy, having this conversation, my ego would have taken some serious hits.

“What’s up is I need a Pick Me Up.” I say the words before I can think, because we’re in the barn.

Because I need a distraction.

I want to ask Mark about the image of me and Amy in my backyard, her hand slipping away from mine. But I want to do that when we’re alone. Letting Tristan and Pet in on a memory of mine isn’t something I’m eager to do.

Not that Mark will tell me anything, anyway.

For a second I contemplate getting Mark really high to loosen his tongue.

Of course, there are a hundred buts, a hundred reasons why I should never do that.

But what if I need to?

If I knew the truth, I wouldn’t have to hurt anymore. My head wouldn’t hurt; my heart wouldn’t hurt; my body—

So tired. My knees buckle a little. I imagine the joints creaking like an old wooden door.

And then someone’s hand is in front of my face, and I can see fingers. I can see space, air in between the fingers, stretching out forever. It’s there, an image that bobs and floats. But at the same time it’s not there...I can’t feel anything...

“Hello? Anybody home?” Tristan says.

I stare, trying to dredge up a response. But there isn’t anything to say. There is just the heaviness that has seeped into my bone marrow.

Hands. On my shoulders. Shake, shake, shake.

Feeling washes over me. My head breaks the surface of the water I was under.

Shake. It’s Tristan. He’s shaking me into the moment.

I push his hand away and force a smile that I instantly regret.

I don’t want him to know me. I don’t. But judging by the way his eyebrows are colliding, he already knows something about me that not many people do. That sometimes, even when I’m awake, I fall so far inside myself that I’m almost asleep.

And I’m not sure what else to do, so I stick my hands in my pockets and take a small step toward the staircase. Because I know how to jump. I know how to feel the wind in my hair, how to let it rip all other thoughts from my mind.

“Ella. Seriously. Another freaking Pick Me Up? I told you that you’re doing it all wrong. You guys are just giving yourselves adrenaline rushes. Amy wouldn’t have felt that way before she died.”

Tristan is too logical, too sensible for us. I bet he likes calculus.

“Shut up,” Mark snarls. “Shut up. What would you know?”

“A lot! You’re not the only one who’s experienced the death of someone close. Why the hell are you doing this? Do you want to lose someone else? Because you know, ultimately, that’s where this goes.”

Pet replies before Mark can. The sneer in her voice, in her eyes, creeps over the entire barn until even the bales of hay seem contemptuous. “Are you afraid of dying?”

And Tristan burns up the contempt with two words: “Fuck, yes!”

We’re all silent after that. Tristan is exploding against us like I’d hoped he would.

Except he’s not driving us together. Well, he may be driving Mark and Pet together; but I’m standing here in total silence, stuffing bits of hay into my mouth and whistling to avoid this conversation.

The dreamlike state is gone. I feel every word of this conversation. Every. Fucking. Word. Every word is my two best friends not telling me the truth. Lying to me. Every word hurts. Every word punches me in the gut.

“Look, it’s up to Ella,” Petal’s saying. “She’s a big girl. If she wants to jump off shit, then that’s her business. I’ll make sure she doesn’t die, just like she would for me.”

All eyes on me. Spotlight. I take a deep breath and—lights, camera, action. I take another step, and as my
foot crunches down into the hay, my resolve breaks. Not because I’m scared. But because it’s just not enough anymore.

“I don’t want to jump off anything right now.” To tell the truth, it’s getting a little stale. Jump off this, jump off that, jump off shit. It’s the same feeling, the same roar in your ears no matter where you fall from.

I want something different. Like floating facedown in a river and almost drowning. Scary, but so exhilarating.

My eyes lock onto the old dartboard in the corner of the room. Amy stole it from the teachers’ lounge when we were in ninth grade because someone dared her to. She gave it to me for my birthday that year since she didn’t have a clue what else to do with it.

And when she died, I put it in the barn. Just like Petal hung the scarves and dresses she “borrowed” from Amy over the safety railings.

Just like Mark hung all her vinyls on the walls. That was their thing as a couple. He and Amy liked their retro rock, their indie rock, their heavy metal, and their sleepy-town Beatles tunes. Their romance floated along in an octopus’s garden, in a yellow submarine.

A breeze murmurs through the barn, stirring a million whispers in the hay. The vinyls spin and scratch against the walls. My friends’ eyes are still on me. My silence is getting too long. It’s stretching out forever. I wait and wait
for someone to reach out and snap it, smash it to pieces.

But they all seem to be waiting for me.

So I close my eyes and say what’s on my mind. I point at the dartboard, at the space it occupies between two of Amy’s favorite vinyls: Hendrix at Woodstock and one of Led Zeppelin’s live recordings.

“Yes, Ella?” Mark asks.

Apparently, pointing at a dartboard and choking on an explanation leads to questions in an awkward tone. I jab my finger again, swallow the porcupine in my throat. “I want you to throw darts at
me
.”

When I say it, their eyes get so wide. Wider than saucers, saucepans. Their mouths hang open as if they’re cartoon characters, as if the dentist has just said, “Open up, please.”

But there are still scribbles of sparkle in their eyes. Still bits of light that yell “Yeah, we’re game.” Tristan smells more like gunpowder than he ever has; but I know, I just know that Mark and Pet are going to help me do this.

Because they’re idiots.

Because they love me, even though they’re lying to me.

“E
LLA, ARE YOU
sure?”

My back is pressed against the wooden wall of the barn. Mark’s toying with a piece of red chalk, tossing it from hand to hand. “Are you sure?” he asks again in his lazy drawl. He knows I’m not backing down. Not now.

Amy would’ve kept on going.

Mark sweeps the chalk around me in a wide arc until I’m encased in a red chalk bubble. I stretch my arms and touch the sides of the bubble, shuffle my feet outward until they’re at the edges of the red line, too. My head sinks lower, and my hair shifts up behind me, pressed against the wall.

“Okay, guys,” I call. “I’m ready for target practice.”

“Ella—” It’s Tristan. He’s holding a dart in his hand, and he’s got this look on his face. I told him he could go—again—and he didn’t reply, but he hasn’t gone anywhere. Yet. I’m certain that once the darts start flying at me, he’ll
fly out the door. “Are you sure you really want to do this?” he asks.

“Stop confusing me. I’m up for it.” When he shakes his head, my mind starts racing. There’s only so much you can do before a person rats you out. If Tristan tells anyone—my parents, the school—I’m fucked. “Look, Tristan, this is really
safer
than me jumping off things. I mean, even if one of the darts hits me, they don’t look like they could kill.”

He raises his eyebrows and turns the dart over in his hands. His eyes linger on the sharp metallic tip. Okay, so what if he has a point? So what if they look totally dangerous? They’re
not
going to kill me.

Because I’m a fucking teenager. And because we’ve set this up so that the gnome’s watching me from the third floor. And it’s highly unlikely that my best friend and I are both going to die in front of the same garden gnome.

“Besides,” I say, feeling a need to justify myself out loud, “I can get back more of my memory like this—”

I stop speaking before I finish the sentence, because this is the first time I’ve mentioned getting my memories back. My hand wants to slap itself over my mouth, take back the words.

I can’t. They sit in a nest of hay.

Mouths agape.

“You mean—” Petal says. “You mean you’re remembering stuff from that night?” Panic flickers like something flammable in her voice. I’m amazed the entire barn doesn’t go up in a blaze.

I close my eyes. What’s so bad that she’s
this scared
for me to find out about it? What terrible thing are they hiding from me?

My chest constricts. My deep breaths shallow out. I dig my nails into my wrist to keep myself in the moment.

Wake up, Ella. Wake up. This is not the time to go under
.

I choke out a response. “Yeah. Remember, I asked you where I was when Amy died?” It was one of the first things I said to Petal when she came out of her room.

“Yeah, but I just don’t know. I mean, you spent most of the night with Amy.”

She stops speaking and exchanges a look with Mark. And I realize that Mark had said that no one knew where Amy was later that night, that no one had seen her.

Except Petal saw her, apparently. Petal saw her
with me
.

And now I really can’t breathe. The air tastes like poison.

Where was I when Amy died?

My hand forms a fist. I slam it into the wooden barn wall behind me. I gasp as the hot pain spreads through my knuckles. And then I laugh at myself. Nothing’s even broken. I’m being such a freaking scaredy-cat.

“Just throw the dart already!”

Well, nothing’s broken
yet
.

Petal goes first. And there’s something angry in the way she tosses her dart. She leans back like the pitcher in a baseball game, and she throws. Adrenaline rushes through my body, floods the fingertips I’ve splayed against the wall. Fight or flight. Fight or flight.

My body’s telling me to run from the sharp, quivering point of a dart buried about two inches away from me. But for once my mind’s overpowering my body and I’m yelling, “Is that all you’ve got? Come on, bring it. Bring it!”

And Mark does. He’s a bit more coordinated than Petal; and when the dart slams into the triangle of space between my underarm and side, he whoops. “Ten points to me!”

“This isn’t a competition, you idiot. We’re not playing a game.” And that’s Tristan, being sensible. Probably wondering what the fuck he got himself into by accepting my invitation to play Pick Me Ups back in English Lit.

But the rest of their argument is lost to me. I can hear the dart quivering, bass vibrations thrumming through the wood, through the air. They sink into my ears and take me back, take me back to the bass beat at the party.